178 Turtas
Byzacena (a Roman province in present-day northern Tunisia). After the death
of his father, under his mother’s tutelage, Fulgentius devoted himself to Latin
and Greek studies and, at a very young age, he managed the family estate and
became the procurator of his region. However, his passion was the monastic
life and the search for the most rigorous modes of that vocation. Fulgentius
thus set out for the mythical Thebaid, stopping in Sicily, Rome, and Sardinia
(ca. 500 AD) before returning home, where he was reluctantly ordained bishop
of Ruspe, a town along the east coast of Tunisia.3 As if under a spell, Fulgentius
ended the frenetic rhythm of his fuga mundi and, following the example of
Saint Augustine, combined the practice of communal life lived in the com-
pany of other monks and clerics with the commitment to the cura animarum.
No sooner did Fulgentius build a monastery at Ruspe, than he was promptly
removed from it and banished to Sardinia, where he remained from 508 to 523,
except for a year (515) spent in Carthage.
The first monastery in Carales was built shortly after Fulgentius’s arrival and
was the product of a spontaneous feeling of brotherhood among the Catholics,
“united by the same chain” of exile, “they shared meals, pantry, prayer, and
study,”4 the activity of the scriptorium, where new codices were prepared (the
Codex Basilicanus of Hilary of Poitiers was collated in Carales in the early
sixth century), as well as correspondence with the various African commu-
nities, which was often entrusted to Fulgentius himself. Fulgentius was also
very active in the life ad extra of Carales, preaching, commenting publicly on
the Bible, openly debating the most burning theological matters (especially
the dogma of the Trinity and predestination), as well as meeting with indi-
viduals to reconcile them and win them to the monastic life, which was, until
that time, unknown on the island.5 The latter process was to dominate in the
second monastery that Fulgentius built after his return from Carthage, with
the permission of the local bishop, Brumasius, on the eastern outskirts of
the city, next to the basilica of the local martyr Saturnus. Near the end of the
3 Lapeyre, Vie de Saint Fulgence de Ruspe.
4 Ibid.
5 Ettore Cau, “Fulgenzio e la cultura scritta in Sardegna nell’altomedioevo,” Sandalion 2 (1979),
pp. 221–229; Raimondo Turtas, “Note sul monachesimo in Sardegna tra Fulgenzio e Gregorio
Magno,” Rivista di Storia della Chiesa in Italia 41:1 (1987), pp. 92–110; Leonard Eugene Boyle,
“The ‘Basilicanus’ of Hilary revisited,” in Scribi e colofoni: le sottoscrizioni di copisti dalle orig-
ini all’avvento della stampa: atti del seminario di Erice, X colloquio del Comité international
de paléographie latine, 23–28 ottobre 1993, eds Emma Condello and Giuseppe De Gregorio
(Spoleto, 1995), pp. 93–105.